Should we feel sorry for fraud victims? We aren’t so sure anymore

For those of you who don’t know we get about 50 calls a day for people who pay upfront for loans that don’t exist. At first we used to feel some sympathy, but now we’ve changed our mind and here is why.

Recently things have deteriorated significantly; we now regularly receive 50+ calls from victims per day. Some have lost up to £800 a time. It’s now so bad that we have had to discontinue our phone support because a high percentage of calls were from victims and not from borrowers. We were almost acting like the financial Samaritans. We tried our best but unfortunately we can’t help everyone with advice.

Then we started to question just why were people sending iTune vouchers to India in order to get a loan? Especially when they had been cold called out of the blue.

The only explanation we could come up with was the victims weren’t always as innocent as they seemed. We started to work out that victims themselves only had interest in getting hold of the money. They themselves never had any interest in repaying the money if they did get a loan from these people pretending to be a lender. In a way, it was like scammer v scammer.

Think we are wrong?

Ask yourself just why someone would send money to people they had never met before - £25 for £5000, Deal! Ask yourself why they don’t ask more questions of the people pretending to be lenders. We think the reason they don’t ask questions is that they don’t want to annoy the so-called lender because they think the lender will then start asking questions about them and find out they don’t have any intentions of repaying the money.

Some people might think we are being harsh here but the reason most victims can’t get credit is that they haven’t repaid lenders in the past. This pushes up costs for everyone else, so should we really feel sorry if these people are on the wrong end of theft for once?